Introduction

In April 2018, Home Secretary Amber Rudd resigned after a series of revelations in The Guardian that she had inadvertently misled Parliament over her role in the unjust treatment of Windrush generation migrants. The Guardian revealed that in a leaked 2017 letter to Theresa May, Rudd had told May of her intention to increase deportations by 10 per cent – at odds with her denials that she was aware of deportation targets, but clearly in line with the hostile environment. Rudd was replaced by Sajid Javid who, presumably in a vain attempt to tone things down, referring to ‘the hostile environment’, declared, ‘I don't like the phrase hostile. So the terminology is incorrect and I think it is a phrase that is unhelpful. … It is about a compliant environment and it is right that we have a compliant environment’. The new term has understandably been largely ignored, given that ‘the hostile environment’ has established itself as a most accurate description of the state of play in the Tory Party of entrenched racism going forward: the hostile environment was here to stay. Two months after his intervention, Javid paused a range of hostile environment policies in order to stop people who have lived in the UK for more than 30 years being ‘erroneously impacted by compliant environment measures’. These included sharing data from HM Revenue and Customs, the Department for Work and Pensions, and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency with the Home Office, thus temporarily halting these combative measures that were introduced under May's watch as Home Secretary. The pause was only for three months.